About Me   I grew up in Dalton, Massachusetts, smack-dab in the middle of the Berkshires ("America's Premiere Cultural Resort").  After high school I went to UMass Amherst for a leisurely five years where I changed majors every once in a while from history to Soviet and Eastern European Studies (now called Slavic and Eastern European Studies) and finally ended up at hotel management.    During and after college, I started out in the hotel industry and managed to work my way up from an intern to a front desk clerk and then up into management.  Between 1997 and 2005, I moved from the Berkshires to New Hampshire, to Boston, and then back to New Hampshire.  During this time I worked at two different Crowne Plaza hotels, a large airport Holiday Inn, and an upscale extended stay hotel.    In January of 2004 I set two goals for the year.  First was to create my own website, and second was to publish a collection of my poetry.   I thought the website would be the harder of the two since I knew nothing about web design, but in three weeks EricNixon.net was up and running (I had wanted EricNixon.com, but that was taken by a real estate agent from the Midwest with the same name).   Publishing the poetry proved much harder.  I thought it would be easy since I had amassed over 700 poems written over the past year and a half, but narrowing it down to a little over a hundred to use for the book proved very difficult and time consuming.  I finally had the finished product in my hands in late summer of 2004.    In 2005, my company promoted and relocated me to a midscale extended stay hotel in Huntsville, Alabama.  While exploring a new area of the country was neat, we longed to return to New England...and finally did a year later where we are much much happier in Western Massachusetts.  I live here with my wife, Kari, our two miniature dappled dachshunds, Baxter & Charlie, and out cats Zoe & NewCat.  When I'm not playing manager at a fancy "granny-chic" boutique hotel, I spend my free time writing a novel, Geocaching, traveling, taking pictures, playing the guitar (badly), painting, and dreaming of someday returning to Paris.